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Implementing and maintaining billing is my daily job for the last 6 years. I would also mention topics like: - Reporting (various data aggregation and audit re
by po1nt 4y ago
Implementing and maintaining billing is my daily job for the last 6 years.
I would also mention topics like:
- Reporting (various data aggregation and audit reports)
- High reliability, nothing hurts company more than unability to bill their customers
- Rounding, this can be seen as a subset of "taxes" but it's much more complex
- Locating user, also can be seen as a subset of "taxes" but user can have country A set in profile configurations, country B on credit card and country C geolocated from IP address
- Timezones, issue everywhere but when we talk accounting it's super important
- Talking to moronic payment gateway providers. This is the biggest ones. I would love to just flip Apple and Google like Linus flipped of nVidia. Proprietary, poorly documented, "find out yourself by weeks of experimenting" bullshit with no easy way of getting technical support even when you bring those companies millions per year. Things don't work, deprecate monthly or weekly and expect you to be always ready to make changes. Some implementation make zero sense at all with complete paradigm shift of handling payments like between Google in-app pay and Google subscriptions.
But as my SO says "Don't cry, it pays well"
- AnhTho_FR 4y agoWow, thanks for sharing! We found out 'billing engineers' are very rare and really demanded, as it requires to be very detail oriented, technical, and business processes oriented. But even if there is high demand (and I guess: corresponding high pay, as you mention), very few engineers are up to the challenge!
- Rafsark 4y agoYep you are right, indeed. We could have mentioned Reporting/Analytics for revenue, which is always a huge pain for companies!
- patrck 4y agoYeah, Audit for the win. And it's not "billing", it's Compliance + Bill Presentment (marketing!) where we are always trying to find the most profitable local maximum of explainability to Sales, Customers, and Management/Enforcement while also having hard checks to prevent or at least mitigate losses. No one wants a Knight Trading excursion....